Mircea Eliade YOGA IMMORTALITY AND ... - Brihaspati.net

one occasion to the most extremist among the tantric. A detail of human sacrifice
practiced in Assam is interesting for the problem at hand: the volunteers were called
Bhogi, and from that mo-ment proclaimed their intention of being sacrificed, became
almost sacred character, and everything was their disposal: in particular could have all the
women they wanted. They were slaughtered in the annual festival of the Goddess, and
Kalika Purana comes to devote an entire chapter to the details of the decapitation, with
the proviso that ritual should not be bloody efectuadopor the first three castes (Griggs, p.
167 ff .). According to this text, impersonating the victim's own Siva This brings us to the
mem-ory another blood sacrifice practiced in India: the Khonds Meriah, who was
strangled, cut into pieces that were buried in the fields of fertility purposes ( see our
Traite dHistoiredes Religions, p. 295 et seq.). The Meriah also embodied the divinity.
However, it is significant to find, in a tantric context that simultaneously meets the
kanpbata Aghori and Yogi, the same blood sacrifice that was practiced elsewhere to
agricultural fertility. It is another example of con-cordancia between saktismo and archaic
ideology of fertility in coexisting sexual and violent death.
'E. Wait, A History of Assam (2nd ed, Calcutta, 1926), p. 58.
In terms of Gorakhnathi theology, we can de-duce that is very elementary: Siva is the
supreme God and salvation is union with the divine through Yoga (Tessitori, Encycl. Rel
Ethics., XII, p. 833). It is for this reason that the Gorakh-nathi proclaim their mastery of
the art of respiration (Briggs, p. 125 et seq.). But mostly they are known and respected for
their magical prestige; parades as healers and magicians, are reputed to give orders to the
rain, show snakes (Briggs, ps. 127 and 142). They attributed the dominance of the wild
beasts live in the jungle surrounded by ti-stoneware that sometimes serve as their mounts
(ibid., 136), archaic, shamanic reason, because the tiger is the "master of the initiation":
in Central Asia in Indonesia, elsewhere too, the tiger or other wild animals come and
carry the neophyte on their backs, the jungle (the symbol of the most alia: Eliade, Le
shamanism, p. 80 et seq., 310, etc. .).
The Gorakhnathi can marry (Tessitori, p. 835; Briggs, p. 46), in the province of Bombay,
almost all are married, and one of the important books of the sect, Gorak-bodh, probably
written in the fourteenth century, admits marriage. At death, not burned, but en-Terre in
meditation posture. It is assumed that remain in samadhi, and thence comes the name
given to their graves sarnadh (Briggs, p. 41). Above the tomb is placed on symbols of
tinga and yoni. (ibid. p. 154). The custom of burying the ascetics and yogis is quite old in
India, is a way of proclaiming that identifies sanniyasi Siva, whose sign (Tinga)
sanctified the tomb and may eventually transform into sanctuaries river. (On the custom
of burying the yogis, see Note VIII, 4). Note in passing the adaptation of samadhi at the
level of popular spiritualism: the tomb becomes a sacred place because it holds not a
corpse, but the body of a "liberated" in a permanent state of meditation. In relation to the
same phenomenon of self-adaptation of the popular mind, note that the siddhi, yogic
powers par excellence, become, for the peasants, in "ghosts" or "devils" who are reputed
to have received their magic directly Gorakhnath . In some parts of Punjab is the Siddhi-
Nerano even under different names, and under a standing-stones (Briggs, p. 137 et seq.).
Former local hierophanies-values are curled by the prestige of Gorakhnath and become
part of this new magic-rehgiosa synthesis that is performed on all chil-Veles aboriginal
culture of India.